5 Simple Steps to Start A/B Testing Today

1. Determine your goal.

Your goal will vary based on your business.

For instance, a Business-to-Business company might be focused on generating more leads for their sales staff. On the other hand, an e-commerce Business-to-Consumer website might want to increase sales.

What do you want to increase?

Quick Tip: If you’re not sure, start at the top of your funnel.

Why?

Because when you optimize your lead generation form, you’ll have more leads going into your sales funnel.

Alternatively, if you improve your checkout page, you’ll get more sales, but you’ll have the same amount of leads going in—effectively placing a limit on your improvement.

Note: Don’t spend a ton of time making this decision. Ideally you’ll do a lot of A/B testing once you have a few tests under your belt. The important thing is that you are testing and improving—whether it’s your lead generation form or home page headline.

2. Decide what to test.

Now that you know your goal and the page you’re going to test, it’s time to decide what element you’ll test.

Note that some sites will see a dramatic improvement in their conversions just by changing the color of their opt-in button. Other sites, however, will see little improvement from a button color change. They’ll have to test bigger elements—like their headline, offer, and USP (unique selling proposition).

Why? Well, one reason could be, if your website visitors don’t understand how you’ll help them, they won’t opt-in—no matter what color the button is.

Quick Tip: If you’re having trouble deciding what to test, choose something—anything. Let’s just get a test up and running. You can always test other elements later.

3. Create your test

There are two parts to this step.

The Creative Part

The first is what you might call “the creative”—or making another version of the element you’re testing.

For instance, maybe your headline doesn’t immediately tell your visitor “What’s in it for me?” Write another version of your headline, this time focusing more on your visitor.

Note: You don’t have to know that your alternate headline is “better.” That’s why we’re A/B testing. Let the data reveal the best headline.

In the above example, I used a 95% confidence level and a 4 for the confidence interval (or margin of error). I left “population” blank (mainly because my day-to-day traffic varies so I’m not sure how many people will see my test per day).

In the above example, the A/B test resulted in 4 goals (these could be sales or leads, depending on your goal) for the control and 8 goals for the variation (or B).

Some might look at this and say, “Obviously B doubled sales!”

However, there is no clear winner. If this were delivered to an additional 1,211 people, the results could be very different.

Here’s another example:

In this screenshot, our sample size was exactly the same. However, our goals (or conversions) were much better. In this case, we can be 99.9% sure that B will get double the conversion rate of A—no matter how many people see the test. That is statistically significant.

At this point, it would be safe to change the control to B and test a new version against B. (Always be testing.)

Note: If your conversion rate is low, you’ll need a bigger sample size—such as a longer test or more traffic—to get statistically significant results.

Don’t Copy Your Competition!

Sites like WhichTestWon.com are extremely helpful in determining what we should test. However, a word of warning:

Do not use someone else’s test results—no matter how good they are—to make changes to your website.

Just because one of your competitors saw better results with a red button, doesn’t mean you will. Instead of blindly copying them, test the change for yourself. You’ll likely be surprised by the results!

DON’T MISS OUT

Christina Gillick is a direct-response copywriter. She helps her clients create loyal customers and raving fans through relationship building copy and marketing. She is also an entrepreneur and founder of ComfyEarrings – The Most Comfortable Earrings on Earth.

ONE COMMENT

Comment Policy

Please join the conversation! We like long and thoughtful communication.
Abrupt comments and gibberish will not be approved. Please, only use your real name, not your business name or keywords. We rarely allow links in your comment.
Finally, please use your favorite personal social media profile for the website field.